A baker by trade, young Sage Singer welcomes her time alone each night as she makes bread and pastries for the New Hampshire retreat center where she works. Self-conscious

by Susie Stooksbury/Special to The Oak Ridger

A baker by trade, young Sage Singer welcomes her time alone each night as she makes bread and pastries for the New Hampshire retreat center where she works. Self-conscious about the scars on her face, she is in deep mourning over the death of her mother. She joins a grief support group where she meets Josef, a kindly 95-year-old retired teacher. They seem to have an instant rapport — enough so that soon Josef confides a horrific secret from his past and asks her to do him a terrible favor. Sage, her grandmother Minka, and Josef poignantly play out the moral dilemma they face in “The Storyteller,” Jodi Picoult’s new novel.

By the time Dara-Lynn Weiss’ daughter Bea was 7, she was 30 pounds overweight. Since Bea was an otherwise healthy girl who ate mostly the right kinds of food and was active, Weiss knew she had to put her on a diet. In April 2012, she wrote an article for Vogue about their experiences. The public outcry was immediate and scathing. Weiss found herself severely criticized for both allowing Bea to become clinically obese and for putting the child on a diet. She writes of that time and how she helped Bea reach a healthy weight in “The Heavy: A Mother, a Daughter, a Diet” (618.923).

Imagine being paid to wander around the globe and then to write about it. William Least Heat-Moon has been doing that for more than 30 years and has several best sellers to show for it. His latest book, “Here, There, Elsewhere” (910.410), brings together many of the magazine articles he has written over the course of his three decades traveling back roads into the four corners of the earth.

Of all her children, it was her son, Ezekiel, who Lillian Cooper dreamed would break free from their small Southern town and share in a world she could only imagine. For a time it looked like he would do it, too, with his scholarship to the University of Virginia. But 20 years later, Ezekiel is living in a shack on her property — working at the local factory, divorced, estranged from his daughters, and still depressed over the drowning death of his twin brother 10 years earlier. In fact, Ezekiel is planning his own death — but his journey back to Charlottesville gives him an unexpectedly different view of life. Ezekiel and Lillian tell their compelling stories in “The Lost Saints of Tennessee,” Amy Franklin-Willis’ fine fiction debut.

While literature abounds with great lovers, there are always a fair number of flesh-and-blood men who seem to have their pick of women. So what makes a successful Lothario? Cultural historian Betsy Prioleau called on psychologists, social anthropologists, philosophers, Harlequin Romance editors, and many more to discover the secrets of men who make females “Swoon: Great Seducers and Why Women Love Them” (155.332).

The hero of Ron Currie Jr.’s, latest novel is a writer named Ron Currie. Still mourning his father’s recent death, the fictional Ron has just gotten together with Emma, the woman he has loved for more than 20 years. Then everything seems to go bad. The newly divorced Emma decides she wants some space, so Ron goes to the Caribbean where his attempt at suicide fails. However, the accident he stages leaves everyone believing he is dead and the manuscript he leaves behind becomes an overnight sensation. So what happens when Ron eventually returns home alive and well? Currie has a great time — and you will too — in “Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles.”